WTO TBT Committee and regulatory measures: prevention, not litigation

Erik Wijkström joined the WTO in 1995. He has a broad experience from several areas of trade policy relating to standards and regulations, including agriculture, sanitary and phytosanitary measures (SPS Agreement), trade and environment, as well as trade and health. He currently heads the team on technical barriers to trade (TBT) within the Trade and Environment Division. Mr Wijkström has a Master Degree in the area of agriculture and economics from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, in Uppsala (Sweden).

Xueyan GUO has been working on trade-related technical standards, conformity assessment, and sanitary and phytosanitary measures. She was with the Chinese Mission to the World Trade Organization in Geneva from 2006 to 2010, when she covered TBT Committee and SPS Committee. She chaired the WTO TBT Committee from 2008 to 2009. Ms. Guo began participating FTA negotiations and has been leading negotiator for TBT and SPS topics since 2011. She joined the General Administration of Customs of China (GACC) two years ago as Deputy Director-general of the International Cooperation Department.

Alan Wm. Wolff became WTO Deputy Director General on October 1, 2017. He was formerly in private law practice in Washington DC dealing extensively with international trade matters. Prior to joining the WTO he was Chairman of the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC), the oldest American association supporting open international trade.

Ambassador Wolff's prior public service includes being U.S. Deputy Special Representative for Trade Negotiations after being General Counsel of the Office, serving as acting Head of the U.S. Delegation for the Tokyo Round of multilateral trade negotiations, and as a principal draftsman of the basic U.S. law creating a mandate for trade negotiations. He has served as a senior trade negotiator in, and advisor to, both Republican and Democratic administrations.

He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), is a lifetime National Associate of the National Academies, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Jeff Weiss co-chairs Steptoe & Johnson’s International Trade Policy & Negotiations practice. He spent more than 15 years in senior legal, policy, diplomatic, negotiation, and political roles in the US government across three administrations – including at the White House, Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), and the Office of the Secretary of Commerce – and served as the US delegate to the WTO TBT Committee from 2007-2011.

Elisa Olmeda is a Counsellor at the Mexican Mission to the WTO, where she is in charge of negotiations for agriculture, non-agriculture market access, accessions and technical barriers to trade. Throughout her postings at the Mission, she has covered both the TBT and SPS Committees. In addition to her 15 year experience in multilateral and bilateral trade negotiations as part of Mexico’s Ministry of Economy, she has held positions and developed projects for the private sector and other multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank. She holds a Master in Science of Foreign Service from Georgetown University and a BA in International Trade from Tec de Monterrey.

Dr. Inu Manak is a Research Fellow at the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies. She is an expert in international political economy, with a specialization in international trade policy and law. Dr. Manak’s research focuses on the World Trade Organization, non-judicial treaty mechanisms, technical barriers to trade, regional trade agreements, and development. Previously, she was a Junior Visiting Fellow at the Center for Trade and Economic Integration at the Graduate Institute and a Fellow at TradeLab, a Geneva-based association that assists developing countries, small to mid-sized enterprises, and nongovernmental organizations build legal capacity in trade and investment law. Dr. Manak is also a participating scholar in the Robert A. Pastor North American Research Initiative, a joint program between American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and the School of International Service. She earned a PhD in Government at Georgetown University

Paul Mertenskötter is an associate with the law firm Covington in Brussels, where he works on international trade and regulatory issues. Paul is also a Fellow at the Institute for International Law and Justice at New York University School of Law, where he worked full-time before. He just defended his PhD at the Humboldt University of Berlin on the interaction between international trade law, transnational corporations, and states' regulation of diets for the prevention of non-communicable diseases. This work focuses, in particular, on the TBT Committee and the STC Mechanism, and he will be discussing aspects of it today. He was a law clerk at the International Court of Justice and a Visiting Scholar at the WTO and holds his law degree from NYU Law School.